After 30 years of bickering and humdrum family chores, suddenly having an empty nest made us fall… madly in love again: JOHN STURGIS

I thought I was too old for this sort of thing. But, in recent months, I have found myself experiencing increasingly intense romantic feelings towards an attractive woman I know.

I find that I am excited when I’m with her, diminished when we are apart. And consequently I seem to feel compelled to press her to come on dates with me – to restaurants, cinemas, bars – and then to accompany me home.

What is perhaps unusual about this scenario is that this woman is my wife.

Yes, I have recently fallen in love with Sian, the woman to whom I have been married for almost 30 years.

And although we were relatively fond of each other for most (but certainly not all) of that time, I would not have characterised our marriage, beyond its heady first months, as particularly romantic.

So suddenly finding ourselves smitten with each other – presumptuously I’m rather hoping my wife shares my feelings – was not something either of us saw coming.

So what caused this surprising marital twist?

Oddly, you might think, it’s been kick-started by us finally becoming what they call empty-nesters.

Last summer we still had three adult children living in our house, a semi in the north London suburbs. But first our daughter, now in gainful postgraduate employment, moved into a rental flat-share with a friend. Then, in the autumn, our youngest went off to university. Finally our middle child bought a one-way ticket to Canada this spring to try his hand in the film industry there.

So we were alone together again – something we hadn’t experienced since the late Nineties, when the first of those children was born.

I know many parents find this empty-nesting moment emotionally gruelling, some to the point that it brings on an existential crisis.

Yesterday it was reported that the number of people getting divorced after 20 years or more of marriage now outstrips the number splitting after five to nine years – the previously most popular point at which the so-called ‘seven-year itch’ kicks in. ‘Empty-nest syndrome’, say experts, often exposes long-standing problems within a relationship and may well be responsible for this increase in the end of longer-term unions.

But – no offence, kids – for us it seemed to do quite the opposite. It was absolutely liberating.

The slog was almost over. Life suddenly seemed simpler and there was more time for leisure, fun and, yes, romance.

Also perhaps there was a subconscious reminder of what life had been like for us before that first child was born, from the summer of 1996 to the spring of 1999, the first child-free years of our relationship.

This was also the last time we might reasonably have been described as being ‘in love’.

Sian and I met in May 1996, when sitting on adjacent bar stools at Subterrania, a long-vanished nightclub in west London. Introduced by mutual friends, we clicked instantly. Three weeks after meeting we went on our first proper date to… Florence. Neither of us are quite sure why we did this rather than just going to, say, the pictures, but grand gestures became characteristic of our early time together.

And Florence was an unqualified success: we had embarked as two people who fancied each other and returned as a confirmed couple.

Then, just another month later – on a beach in Kefalonia, Greece – I proposed. A number of friends thought I was having a mental health episode. One or two tried to stage an intervention. But I was not to be dissuaded, and Sian was just as keen.

On December 20, 1996 at Marylebone Town Hall in London, a week after I turned 30 and a fortnight before Sian would – and just six months on from first meeting – we were married.

On December 20, 1996, at Marylebone Town Hall in London, a week after I turned 30 and a fortnight before Sian would – and just six months on from first meeting – we were married

And that was when things started to go downhill.

We returned from our wonderful honeymoon – in Mexico, much of it in a paradisical shack on a Caribbean beach – to the greyest and bleakest of Januarys. Suddenly it felt time to stop being impulsive and romantic and get back to living in a more practical way.

Both of us were at pivotal points in our respective careers – me consolidating my newish status as a national newspaper journalist, Sian as a womenswear buyer for a high street brand – trying to negotiate a step up in seniority and so having to be more focused on work than we had during our breathless courtship.

Then we wanted to get a place together which began to consume whatever was left of our energy.

And once we had acquired it, a Victorian terrace in Stoke Newington, we were occupied with decorating and furnishing and doing the garden. Not quite one year later, we upgraded to a bigger place, a real doer-upper, in nearby London Fields in east London, which meant even more time and money spent on domestic affairs.

Admittedly there were still nights out, but their number was dipping, their winding-up time becoming earlier. And for still immature me, having been single for most of my adult life, the relative novelty of knowing that I would be leaving a party with the same person I had arrived with perhaps diminished their appeal.

Maybe Sian felt this too: somehow there seemed less point to going out, so we went out less.

And then suddenly – it certainly felt sudden – in March 1999, we had a baby. A baby, for goodness sake. It was a huge shock to my lingering immaturity. And we became completely absorbed in parenthood. We changed.

In the summer of 2000, we moved house again, to something more family friendly, nearer good schools, in the north London suburb of Palmers Green. Two more children followed, both boys, in 2001 and 2006.

And couple life became family life. Nursery, infants and primary school. Swimming lessons, drama club, Brownies and Cubs, birthday parties and summer camps. Bedtime stories and family films. We watched 101 Dalmatians alone about 101 times.

And that was basically our life. Our personal relationship began to wither.

I recall one particular moment as a nadir – when we took a holiday to Ibiza in 2009. We both wanted to be young and sexy, the beautiful people. But instead, both now 43, we were plainly ageing rapidly and, rather than staying up dancing till 6am as we wanted, we were getting up at 6am to watch Thomas the Tank Engine.

I’m ashamed to admit, we took this disappointment out on each other.

At this point I should clarify that we have always been a somewhat combative couple. Even at our most contented, our time together is often punctuated by low-key bickering: ‘That’s not how you load a dishwasher’; ‘I see you still haven’t mown the lawn’; ‘You’ve bought the wrong cheese’… And so on.

Fairly regularly there were full-blown rows. But Ibiza took this to another level of resentment and annoyance. I recall wondering if our marriage would survive the summer.

We were plainly ageing rapidly and, rather than staying up dancing till 6am as we wanted, we were getting up at 6am to watch Thomas the Tank Engine

Gradually things shifted.

Instead of being woken before we wanted to be, it was the children who would sleep in until all hours. We began to get more time to ourselves – and each other.

We could go out in the evening without it being a palaver with babysitters. At weekends we could do something we wanted to rather than always having to rush to football practice, ballet, drama club etc. There were long absences at university and gap-year travel trips – when we would alternate between living vicariously through their Instagram posts and worrying about them. And finally this April all of them were gone at once.

Which was when our slowly improving relationship really went up a gear.

We began to enjoy each other’s company more, a good deal more. We became freshly aware of how many shared interests we have – food and cooking, restaurants and pubs, cinema and novels, the countryside. We began to communicate better when apart, messaging each other more often with observations or encouragement. We became more thoughtful. We both lost some weight, toned up.

We went on dates – every week. I began to make more effort to dress as though I was on one.

And, miraculously, our tendency to argue diminished.

Our domestic environment seemed more harmonious, too. We cooked together as a team rather than alternating between chef and critic, which had often previously sparked rows. We took the trouble to light candles and put music on. We ate meals together sitting down at a set table. It was all a little bit like being in a new relationship when really it was a new spin on a much older one.

But there also seemed to be more time apart to pursue our different interests separately. For me the theatre, gigs, reading; for her evenings out with friends at the cinema or pub, yoga or Tai Chi classes. We’d often be apart, particularly in the first half of the working week – early nights, separate beds.

Partly this was because I tend to get up earlier and Sian is a light sleeper, but it was also because of her health issues.

Over the past five years, following an initial prosthetic hip replacement, Sian has had a series of painful and traumatic dislocations, all five requiring an ambulance to A&E, a trip to theatre under anaesthetic to reattach the hip, followed by many months of recuperation – only for it to happen again.

The craziest episode came two years ago when it happened yet again as we were embarking on a holiday, on a ferry to northern Spain, and she had to be airlifted by helicopter 100 miles to Bordeaux.

The wind was blowing so hard that the rescue party couldn’t safely land. Instead she was strapped to a stretcher and winched 50 yards up into the hovering chopper while dosed up with ketamine and morphine. It was more than a little unreal.

And then, last December, all our planned Christmas events were wiped when it happened yet again during a dinner party with friends – meaning ten days in hospital. Festive it was not.

But even though this has been gruelling for her, it too has brought us closer together, making me more empathetic, and had the effect of making smaller, dishwasher-sized problems seem relatively inconsequential.

Another factor in things improving was a small upturn in our finances.

This was in part provided by two of our three children becoming financially independent – the light at the end of the tunnel after feeling that we were endlessly paying for student accommodation. At one point I had been paying five monthly iPhone bills. No wonder I felt skint.

The truth is, our finances had been on the slide for years, a steady decline from a peak in the dual-income-no-kids early days of our marriage. Both our industries of choice – fashion and journalism – encountered huge challenges which made them less lucrative. We both experienced redundancy, with the anxiety and potential for recrimination that comes with it.

Over the past five years, following an initial prosthetic hip replacement, Sian has had a series of painful and traumatic dislocations

We responded by downsizing – to significantly cut our monthly outgoings – but did so a decade earlier than would have seemed natural, and moving into a smaller house initially made our home life more stressful. Yet what was a squash for five is very much a harmonious home for two.

Sian also had both the foresight and drive to get out of fashion and into something more sustainable and eventually more profitable – the pharmaceutical industry. The transition period was particularly hard on our finances, but it’s been a boon longer term, and she’s also avoided the feeling-unemployable fate currently faced by so many women in their 50s.

The dividend from this small financial upturn has been more budget for nice things. In the past year or two we have had holidays or long weekends in Lyon, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Santander, Tunis, Lublin in Poland, Transylvania, Vienna, Budapest and Cape Town, as well as domestic breaks in Cardiganshire, Shropshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Suffolk and Kent.

As a footnote, a comparison – with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit. It’s hard to credit now, but around the time that Sian and I met, they were the most famous celebrity couple in Britain. And for a spell we seemed to have some odd connection.

When we went to get our wedding rings from a jeweller in Hatton Garden in London, Liam and Patsy had just got theirs from the same place that morning, we learned. The night after our wedding and the following day, before we flew to Mexico, we stayed at Cliveden, the stately home hotel in Buckinghamshire – and so did Liam and Patsy. We had a blurry pre-iPhone camera selfie with the Oasis star. Then, four months after we had, they too got married – at the same venue in Marylebone.

Fortunately, we have outlasted Liam and Patsy’s marriage by 26 years and counting. We seemed to roll with it better than they could.

And we are happier now than at practically any time since getting hitched.

Those male friends who doubted my sanity in 1996 may begin doubting it again reading this. But, yes, I am in love with my wife.